


Trouble Inside Our Skin

by those_sibilants



Series: The Sound Of It [2]
Category: The Night Shift (TV 2014)
Genre: AU, Angst, Fluff, M/M, Mentions of Suicide, Some swear words, self hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-26 00:15:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3830110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/those_sibilants/pseuds/those_sibilants
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fear looks like this, too, he thinks as he presses his lips to the stretch of skin below his cheek and settles further into the crook of Drew’s body. He doesn’t know when he became terrified of Drew or, maybe, not Drew but what he represents and that scares him more than anything else. It’s there, though, this fear bubbling just under his skin, burning and uncomfortable. How can I love you when I don’t know how to love myself, he thinks as Drew drops his hand to his back and strokes long and slow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trouble Inside Our Skin

**Author's Note:**

> This is meant to be a follow up to "Don't Leave Our Hyper Heart on the Water" but I don't think reading that first is necessary at all. I started this all the way back in November but then grad school and thesis-y stuff got in the way. Obviously, this doesn't follow the show's timeline but, lets say, it is another version of how Rick and Drew could have handled Rick's injury. The title is a slightly altered line from The Nationals's song "Slipped" off of the album Trouble Will Find Me. Check it out. It's beautiful. The epigraph is from Richard Siken's book, Crush, which is devastating and gorgeous and so, so amazing. This whole fiction/narrative thing is very new to me (I usually write poetry) so I am sorry if the plot doesn't seem plotty. And, finally, thank you for taking the time to read this silly, little thing. You are gorgeous and it means a lot to me.

All night I stretched my arms across

him, rivers of blood, the dark words, singing

with all my skin and bone _Please keep him safe._

_Let him lay his head on my chest and we will be_

_like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed_

_to pieces_.

~ Richard Siken, “Saying Your Name”

 

                   

          Sometimes, at night, when Drew is at work and he is alone with his heartbeats and thoughts, fear comes like heartburn that settles acidic in what is missing. It is a slow burn of being less than, being not whole, and it overcomes him in the darkness when sleep is just a faint illusion and he is so alone. Sometimes, fear is a quick stabbing, a twisting knife between his ribs. It leaves him breathless, gasping, wrung-out and paralyzed with pain. There is no pattern. No way to predict when he becomes nothing more than a vehicle for fear. He hates it. Hates how he can feel it collect just below his knee where there is air and nothing more. It hurts more than the sutures ever did. Sometimes, when Drew gets home, when he jolts awake and falls off the bed because he has forgotten that normal was ripped away from him, he’s curled in upon himself, shaking, drenched in sweat and Drew tucks himself into the negative space of Rick’s body, pulls him close, and breathes.

“You’ve got to breathe with me, Rick.” He says, mouth against Rick’s ear, voice a rumble of desperation, of exhaustion. “Just breathe. I’ve got you.”

          And, sometimes, daylight is waves of fear. It’s the steady clackclackclack of crutches on the tile floor and how his jeans bag bellow his right knee. It’s his refusal to look at the scar – a new pink, a mend line. At first, he avoids the light, has Drew pull all the blinds and drowns under waves of fear while Drew hovers, uncertain and nervous. It is easier to pretend in the dark, in their bed, where he doesn’t have to acknowledge that things have changed. Fear is the nausea induced by pain medication and the radiating spikes of pain when he tries to go without them. Fear is the look in Drew’s eyes when he leaves for work in the late afternoon and whispers _I love you, please, please be safe._ And, sometimes, fear is the way he doesn’t want to be safe. Later, fear is too bright fluorescent lights, parallel walking bars, and a physical therapist telling him to _swing from the hip, always from the hip_ like some sort of mantra. It’s the way newness pinches, shifts, and reshapes and the never ending ache.

          This is not how Rick falls apart. This is not the process of rendering to chaos and pieces. He has already been parsed – crushed parts rejected and removed because his body let him down. No, this is what happens after the pieces have been scattered. After the doctor said there was no other choice but to be proactive and destructive. After Drew refused to touch and, oh god, the look in his eyes when he finally did.  After Drew cried, gasping, wracking kind of sobs, in the quiet of their apartment while he watched, dry-eyed, as his partner fell apart. After he cracked his knuckles against their shower's tiled wall and decided he loved the pain too much. It’s after he yelled and yelled and yelled at Drew to leave him alone. After he googled “the best ways to commit suicide,” when Drew did as he was told and left Rick alone in their apartment. It’s after Drew came back and found Rick in a heap on the floor. It’s after Drew cradled his broken body and rocked him to sleep night after night. Rick is used to chaos and combat. He is used to fighting but he has never known the aftermath. Never had to find a way to puzzle his way back together. He has never been what he is fighting against and he doesn’t know what to do anymore.

          Rick knows that Drew understands this fear. When they were just blurring the lines of something more than just a quick fuck; when Drew, just back from his first tour, would stay the night and they would eat breakfast together in the morning, rumpled and a little bashful; when this something was the most stable thing either of them ever had at the time, Drew would shout and thrash in his sleep. Rick remembers the cadence of his ragged breath, the way he woke trembling, disoriented, and gasping with sweat slick skin.  Rick sat with him when this fear turned into anger. After Drew punched a hole in the bedroom wall, he learned how to drywall and wrap a hand. And he remembers what it is like to wake to an empty bed and a broken mirror, to watch, in the still riot of night, as the person, who you may love, falls apart. He can still hear the way Drew’s voice was cracked and ruined when he said that pain makes him forget. Pain made the noise in his head more bearable and, for just a moment, it drowned out the screams. So he found a gym near Drew’s house and held the punching bag steady until Drew sank to the floor spent and, later, pressed his lips to the bruised and ragged skin of his knuckles. Tucked away in a corner, he watched the way Drew left the ring, all bloodied and laughing, after he lost his first regulation fight and, when the crowed surged around the fighters, boisterous, Rick snuck out the side door. He was there for the after, for the exhaustion, for the cuts and bruises and the way Drew smiled a little easier, a little lighter.  _Maybe,_ he thought as he wrapped himself around Drew in bed later that same night, lips pressed against the top notch of Drew's spine, _maybe this will work._

          Early afternoon is unconcerned as it slants through the windows, dust spins lazy in its wake, and, as Drew rummages and packs his fight bag, humming off-key, Rick thinks how easy it is to hit and hit and hurt, to move on when one can fight something tangible.  Sometimes, when he watches Drew move and stretch, wholly himself again, he can't help but realize that, no matter how much he fights and hits and bruises, he will always be known, by himself and by others, by what is absent. He already knows the way people’s gazes linger on his back as he moves in a slow-hitch (swing from the hip, always the hip), the way eyes trace down until they find something that is missing. Rick hates how people’s faces change, how their eyes turn pity dark, how, once they notice the way his right leg is not quite right, not quite natural, they always avoid eye contact, or the way people pitch their voices lower, softer when they say _I am so sorry_ or _thank you for your sacrifice_ as if tonality can make their empathy just that much more pronounced. It's an artifice, a superficiality, that Rick has never known before and, sometimes, usually in the soft glow of late afternoon, he sees it flicker across Drew's face, too.

“Will you come this afternoon?” Drew kneels before him, voice so quiet that it slips and eases in the stillness, a kind of fleeting hope that makes Rick ache a little.

Rick flinches away from the hands rubbing up and down his thighs. “I can’t Drew.”

"C'mon," he says as he stretches forward and cups the back of Rick's head. "I know you've been through a lot but you can't lock yourself in here for the rest of your life."

He shoves Drew's shoulders, unbalances him. "You know shit."

"You know what, Rick?” Drew runs a hand down his face, pushes to his feet. "You’re right I don’t know what you are going through but I sure as hell know what it is like to hate myself."

And Rick watches the way Drew’s knuckles whiten when he fists the gym bag. Watches the way he squeezes his eyes shut and his jaw clenches before he turns on his heels. The door slams, echoes in his chest as it constricts, and he feels the stillness ache bright in his molars, in his joints. In this moment, when quiet lies resolute and harsh, it resembles something like fear. It makes him sick.

            When they were just starting, when he felt antsy with newness and the want to touch and touch and touch, he saw all of the ways Drew hated himself. The way he flinched when Rick ran a casual hand down his arm or how Drew instinctively moved away from him even when they were alone. How terrified Drew had been to move past casual fucking to something more. So Rick let his hands linger when they were alone, whispered _beautiful_ and, later, _I love you_ in the dark of too early, and held on to the frayed edges of what they could be. Somewhere in the uncertainty of it all, in the mess, he fell in love with someone who hated himself. It hurt. _This is not who I am_ Drew said still pink with exertion, sweat still clinging near the hairline, or _this is not who I want to be_. And Rick watched as he dressed and refused to look at him. He watched the way Drew’s shoulders tensed and his hands shook. The door always thudded closed behind him and Rick felt it linger for days.

          Stillness stretches and contorts time, makes him numb to the silence, and holds tight in his core. Rick isn't sure how long he sat in the static of an empty apartment before the doorbell rang. He isn't sure how long it took before the doorbell morphed into a fist pounding hard enough to rattle the door.

“Jesus Christ, I’m coming,” he shouts as he levers himself off the couch, leans heavily on his cane, and jolts his way to the door.

“What the hell are you doing, Rick?” Krista shoulders her way into the entryway, knocking into his good side hard.

He stares at the girl in front of him who vibrates with anger and runs a hand down his face, quirks an eyebrow, and waits for her to continue.

“Do you even know how fucking terrified Drew is of this match tonight?” She asks, teeth gritting, fists clenching and unclenching by her side. “It is his first fight since coming out, Rick, and you are not there.”

“I didn’t know I needed to hold his hand.” Rick shrugs as we leans casually against the front door. “Last time I checked, Drew was a grown man.”

She steps into his pace, chin raised, defiant. “Are you really this much of an asshole?”

“Look, Krista, I’m not going to go and face people who were once my equal.” Pushing off the door, he steps around her and makes his way back to the living room. “I am not going to be pitied.”

She darts in front of him. “I see. You are not just an asshole but a chicken, too. Maybe Drew would be better off without you, tough guy.”

He considers her finger pressed into his chest, her squared shoulders, strong stance. “You know nothing.”

“I know that you would rather sit in the dark and pity yourself instead of supporting the man you say you love. I know that it’s killing Drew to know that he can’t help, that you do not want his help. Jesus, Rick, I saw him the night you were brought in. I watched him unravel and continue to unravel. He’s just barely hanging on.” She slides her hand down to his bicep and squeezes

Something like a hand tighten around his ribcage and his skin seems to shrink or he is bigger than his body, a kind of profound tightness. It stings his eyes, catches in his throat. “I don’t know what to do or who I am anymore.”

“No one expects you to have the answers.” She says, softly. “We just want you to try.”

“Fuck,” Rick exhales as he presses the heels of his hands into his stinging eyes.

“Pretty much.” Krista says, voice made light by a breathy sort of laughter. “So what’s it going to be?”

           By the time they reach the fight, he feels tight, splitting and fault lined, like someone slit his skin and injected fear into the root of it all. It itches something fierce and he wants to scratch and scratch and scratch until his skin peels off like old paint and he is raw, scrubbed new. His stride, off kilter and weird, echoes across pavement, makes him wince, makes him want to turn around and hide in the car but Krista is there, stride calibrated to his, fingers squeezing at his elbow. The handle of his cane digs into his hand, chaffs his skin, and he feels stiff, fatigued, from PT that morning. Some stragglers roam in the parking lot and he pushes his sunglasses up his nose, glances away from their curious stares. The space around the cage is people thick and noisy with fellow soldiers and pedestrians, alike, laughing and drinking in the warm spring afternoon. She propels him forward into the masses, into the thick of it, and all he can do is follow and flinch at the collision of bodies.

            When Drew moves, he does so with an innate confidence, a kind of arrogance, which stems from being comfortable in his body. There is a fluidity, a precision, in the flex and release of muscle that leaves Rick breathless. The first time he saw Drew the other man was in motion, head thrown back, laughing at something someone was saying. So young and carefree that the memory seems so foreign or a forgery of what he really was. There was an ease, a lightness, to him that made Rick want to know more. It made him want to watch the man and learn this ease. Now, he knows the intimate ways that body moves. He has tongued the sweat that clings to his hairline, gathers in the small of his back. He still loves to watch him move, to watch the precision, the way energy builds and releases. He loves how sure Drew is in his body. And, now, he watches this man stretch in the cage, so wholly himself, that it makes him hurt, makes him feel incomplete. He hates him for it and he hates that he resents Drew’s wholeness.

“Hey, man,” TC says as he joins Rick in the stands, “it’s been awhile. How are you doing?”

“I’m,” he swallows hard, rubs his palms down his thighs until his right hand reaches the intersection of skin and prosthetic and jerks away, drops his hands to his sides. “I’m here, you know. I’m here.”

TC studies him, nods. “We should get a beer sometime, catch up.” He waits until Rick shrugs, then nods, before turning back to the cage. “So when was the last time you saw Drew fight?”

The tenseness eases away as he tells the older man about Drew’s first fight and how it ended with a broken nose and some cracked ribs. How that fight taught Drew that he needed to move his feet and to always keep his hands up. When the story tapers out, when TC laughs besides him and he can feel a smile stretching the skin around his mouth, he glances at Drew, still now, head cocked and smiling. _Thank you,_ he mouths and Rick feels his happiness ache in his chest, behind his eyes. He lets TC talk at him until the whistle sounds, until the crowd surges and cheers, until Rick sees the way Drew moves in the cage, and then he can only watch.

          The first time he came back from war he had to fight to regain his equilibrium. He had to relearn who he was outside of the army, outside of war and chaos, and had to figure out how it defines him. It was a kind of war this learning to live again in the quiet. Some sort of quasi-battlefield that left him reeling and twitchy like ants were crawling beneath his skin, like his nerves were tuned toward every sound, every little fluctuation in noise. Drew was there on the periphery ready to wrap fingers around his wrist and hold on tight. And, at night, Drew pressed Rick’s hands over his head and pushed _ininin_ until Rick was surrounded by weight and heat and his body thrummed in time with Drew and want, a kind of grounding rod, a kind of anchor. It left him achy, sated, and still enough to finally sleep.

          For some reason, it has always been easier for him to speak in the dark when the house things are a still, constant hum, and silhouetted in whatever light bleeds through the window, under the door cracks. He used to think that it was because he could hide, could slide into the shadows, and disappear and, later, the way Drew grew younger, softer, distorted in the low light. At first, the dark of a bedroom, limbs loose and stretched across the bed, touching in some way (a hand resting between shoulder blades, the length of a calf pressed against another calf), was the only place Drew ever mentioned possibility, the what-ifs. _One day we should go to Paris, to Rome_ , he’d say, sleep edging its way into his voice, skin still slick and pink with exertion, with arousal, _I like the old cities_ or _I see us in so many places, Rick, you are everywhere._ And Rick would think _I want that, I want all of it_ or _beautiful man, please don’t leave_ , as he stroked over long lengths of skin, pressed his lips to a shoulder blade and the tender place where skull meets the spine. So Rick waits on the couch in the dark. He waits and lets the hum and echo of their home vibrate through him. Let’s it settle him. He knows that Drew will eventually come home. He always does.   

            Of course he heard the door opening, hinges squeaking slightly, but in this silence, this stillness, these noises seem distant, removed, so it takes the sagging couch and the blooming warmth of Drew’s thigh pressed against his to stir him. Head lulling against the back of the couch, he cracks his eyes and takes in the way Drew’s shadowed face is drawn in, tired. _When did those lines appear_ , he thinks, as Drew presses his palms into his eyes to try and rub away the weariness.

“You were incredible this afternoon, Drew.” The sound of his voice, however quiet and low he pitches it, cuts through the silence. It sets him on edge, sparks his nerves, and, suddenly, he doesn’t want this darkness, this quiet. He wants it to be loud and fast and chaotic so he can no longer feel this weird sting in his nerve endings. A bruise blooms angry over Drew’s right cheekbone and he tongues the split in his lower lip. Rick wants to reach out and sooth the broken skin but he doesn’t.

Drew leans his elbows on his knees, clasps his hands, and hangs his head. “You told me that you would rather die than have your leg amputated, Rick, and I can’t help but think that you still want that.” The quiet stretches in between the buzz of appliances. Rick doesn’t look at Drew. Doesn’t want to see the way defeat deepens the grooves of his face, darkens the shadow under his eyes, roughs his voice. “I tried,” Drew’s voice cracks, thickens with wet, “to save your leg, Rick. I tried so damn hard but it wasn’t enough.”

He slides closer, presses himself against Drew as if his heat, his weight proves something he has yet to say. “Hey, hey, look at me, Drew.” He cradles the back of Drew’s head with his hand, runs his fingers through the short hairs found there. “Listen to me. None of this is your fault. None of it. OK?”

The man shakes apart in his arms, condenses into his tears, and he holds on to the pieces of him, to his warmth. This is what they did. They chip and shatter and crack but, overtime, they reform so he presses his lips to Drew’s temple and lets Drew fall apart. He spills, too, quiet and wet and still. When Drew quiets, when his skin feels tacky, stretched too tight across his cheek bones, breath burns in his ribcage. Rick’s breathe hitches, too, and he knows that painful catch, that almost hiccough. Sometimes air and space hurts the most. He knows this, too.

Rick pulls back slightly, holds Drew’s head between his hands. “I love you, Drew.”  He shudders out a wet breath. “But you can’t fix this or me. You can’t make things better this time.” Drew tenses under his fingers, starts to pull away, but he holds fast. “I need to learn who I am still and you can’t help me with that. Not this time.”

“You are still you, Rick.” He says, quietly, “I don’t understand why you insist that you aren’t. Your leg doesn’t make you who you are.”

“Whether I am still the same person is not the point.” He settles a hand on Drew’s chest. “I had to learn how to walk again. I have to learn how to move and how my body works and how to function is this cloud of pain. Things have changed, Drew, and I don’t think you understand or want to understand that. Someday, I may be able to do the same things I used to do but that is a long ways off. My life cannot be the same anymore and I don’t even know what it’s going to look like now.”

Drew slips out of Rick’s hold, chews his bottom lip. “OK. So what can I do? Where do I fit in all of this?”

“Love me and continue to love me when things get ugly because I can’t promise that they won’t, kick my ass when I need it.” He rubs a thumb under Drew’s eye, over his cheekbone, thumbs his bottom lip. “And, maybe, learn to cook something other than stir fry.”

He huffs out a laugh, a little wet, a little rough. “Jerk.”

“You love me.” Rick says as he presses his forehead to Drew’s temple and slides his hand under the thin material of his T-shirt to rest on Drew's stomach

“Yeah,” he settles into the other man, “I do.”

            After Drew peeled layer after layer off of him. After Drew whispered _I love you_ and _don’t leave me, please, don’t leave_ into his navel, his hip bones, and Rick let those words collect and stay in his chest. After Rick hums with the need, the want, to be split open, raw, he gasps _please_ into Drew’s skin and Drew holds him down, presses into him so slow that Rick feels it in his molars, in the tips of his toes. After they learn to breathe together, they drown together. They lay twisted in sheets, in each other, sticky in the quiet aftermath. A quiet that aches so good and breathes around them. He pillows his head on Drew’s chest, traces words he is afraid to say into his skin, and breathes in the scent of sweat and them and love. _Fear looks like this, too_ , he thinks as he presses his lips to the stretch of skin below his cheek and settles further into the crook of Drew’s body. He doesn’t know when he became terrified of Drew or, maybe, not Drew but what he represents and that scares him more than anything else. It’s there, though, this fear bubbling just under his skin, burning and uncomfortable. _How can I love you when I don’t know how to love myself_ , he thinks as Drew drops his hand to his back and strokes long and slow.

“Alright?” Drew asks, voice a slow, lazy rumble.

“No,” he turns on his side away from Drew and pulls the other man’s arm over him so he is surrounded by skin and warmth and familiarity. Tangling their fingers together, he presses his lips to Drew’s battered knuckles, “but I’m working on it.”

            It’s TC he goes to two weeks later for the name of a person who will help him learn how to talk around the fear lodged in his throat. _You should tell Drew, you know,_ is what TC parts with and Rick nods and says he will when he knows how to.  The person, Dr. Marisela Pascal, is an older woman, maybe in her late forties, who specializes in PTSD and post-traumatic psychology. She never asks about the accident or how he feels or about the fear that sits and crushes his sternum, that balls in his throat so he can’t swallow or speak. He doesn’t know where to start so he starts at the beginning and talks about being a closeted jock in high school and in basic training. He talks about how it became easier and harder to stay in that place when he met Drew.  He tells her about their beginning and how terrified they both were. How the repeal of _Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell_ doesn’t really mean anything in the everyday mindset of the military. The session ends when he tells her that sometimes when he is alone he hates Drew and sometimes he feels hollow inside like this thought could possibly render him incomplete. And he goes back the next week and she asks about the hollowness and his tours and, a few weeks later, he tries to find the words to make her understand that he can no longer define who he is.

“Why do you need a set definition?” She asks one after noon. “Why do you feel like you should be able to summarize yourself in a neat, little phrase?”

The military was that definition for him. He was a captain. He led troops. These are the facts that he wants to tell her, that he wants her to understand.

“Yes,” she nods, “but you are also a son and someone’s partner. You are someone who enjoys cooking and building things. Someone who likes to take hikes and camp and play sports. Why are you trying to limit yourself by insisting on a single definition? The accident took away a single lens to view your life and who you are. Think of the way painters can scrape off paint and start again. It’s not a deletion but a revision to the composite of the painting.”

            The sun is still morning soft and golden when he crosses his arms and leans against the outside wall of the emergency room and waits for Drew to emerge. It’s late spring and warm and Drew raises an eyebrow in surprise, smiles big, true, when he walks through the sliding doors.   

“What are you doing here?” Drew asks when he stops in front of the other man.

Rick kisses Drew’s cheek, tangles their fingers together. “I want to take you out to breakfast.”

“Oh, really?” He hums, brow furrowed. “I guess it’s a good thing that I want some breakfast, hmm?”

“Jerk.” Rick knocks their shoulders together as they meander their way to Drew’s truck.

“Yeah,” Drew grins, “but you love me.”

He feels it then, a kind of lightness, a kind of unknotting, as if he can finally breathe again. “I really do.”

            There are little things that make Drew in Rick’s mind such as the way he bites his lip when he thinks or worries or how he is unable to sit still for any measurable amount of time unless he has something to do with his hands. How easily flustered he gets, especially when Rick whispers into his ear. His calmness. The way he hates movies that are overly violent or gory because it remind him too much of real life. How hard he tries to do the fair thing, the right thing, and, when he makes a wrong decision, makes a mistake, how hard he tries to correct those that he can. How he loves so deliberately. _This_ , Rick thinks as he watches Drew tear a napkin into threads, _is worth it all_.

“I’ve been going to a psychologist once a week for the last month or so.” He tells the other man after their waitress takes their order.

Drew swallows a mouthful of orange juice. “I know. TC told me he recommended Dr. Pascal. Figured you would tell me when you felt like you could.”

“I didn’t mean to keep it a secret from you,” Rick starts, hesitantly, “but it was something I had to do for myself and I didn’t know how to tell—“

“Hey, Rick,” Drew interrupts and reaches across the table to squeeze his hand. “I understand. Is it helping?”

“Maybe,” he meets Drew’s gaze. “I think so.”

“OK.” Drew says, smiling.

 _OK_ , he thinks, _OK_. It’s such a simple word, a gesture, really, and he thinks about all the phrases that the word clings to: _I want you to be, are you, is everything_. Those are the questions that Rick is just starting to figure out an answer to. It’s there on the tip of the tongue. And he watches the man sitting across the table from him tell a story about his shift last night. Both hands gesturing wildly as he laughs. _I’ll be ok,_ he thinks, _we’ll be ok._ And then he laughs, too.

**Author's Note:**

> I think there may be a third part to this series. Is anyone interested in it?


End file.
